Since Heroes premiered in the U.S.A.,
it's become a massive hit around the globe.
We go back to where it all started in the mind of the creator Tim Kring,
and find out how a mixture of brilliant scripts,
dedicated actors, and a strong visual look
have brought the writers' words to life on the screen.
Transcript: Sparrowrulez
Synch: Fed.
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Tim Kring's come a long way
since penning an episode of Eighties classic Knight Rider.
From writing Teen Wolf Too, to Chicago Hope,
and creating long running crime drama Crossing Jordan,
but it's Heroes, that could be his biggest and best creation to date.
First of all, I wanted to have a very simple and iconic kynd of title.
I saw in my mind as almost the graphics of the title.
I am raising two kids on my own,
both small kids, and thinking about the world that they're being brought up in,
in contrast to the world that I was raised in,
and I think one of the missing elements is this idea that
we don't seem to be able to find heroes, the way we did when I was a kid.
I never wanted the show to lean too heavily
towards the idea of superhero genre,
and so by clipping off the idea of super,
before, I felt there was power in that.
What is the shock of being oblate?
- What's gonna happen? - Well, this's gonna be...
Tim assembled a cast and crew to make up pilot episode.
The future of Heroes rested on his success.
I got a call from Tim who had now finished the pilot.
Now, if you really know Tim he very much down place everything
and he said: "You know, I can have a
a cut of the pilot, could you come over and take a look at and...
tell me if there is anything there."
I was so blown away by it, I was so
cut off guard about how powerful piece it was.
God, I've walked down the hall, and,
he was in his office and he looked up and he said:
"So, what do you think?" I said: "I start Monday."
And he said: "No, really, look, you know tell me what you think."
And I said: "No, I really I start Monday."
A world winning writer, Jeph Loeb,
is revered in the graphic novel world for his iconic works.
A long time collaborator with Heroes' artist Tim Sale,
he's also scripted on the hit U.S. shows "Lost" and "Smallville",
the perfect addition to Tim's writing team.
I remember really clearly Tim handing me a piece of paper,
and there was a list of writers that he wanted.
It's the sort of list that you put together
when you expect to get one or two of them.
There were six people on the list.
Then I was "That's a great list, so who do you really want?"
And he looked to me and he said: "All of them."
Tim wants to be surrounded by passionate, terrific writers.
Ultimately, it's his show, they're his characters and his tone in voice.
We looked around the room, and we started saying:
"Do you wanna write the Nikki scenes? "Do you wanna write the Claire scenes?"
And it's really collaborative, creative way to put a television show together.
I've worked on shows where there are writers, but the one writer,
an imposition of their vision, over and over again.
I don't think it's this creative, it wouldn't be for this kind of show,
where you got multilevel stories, and so many different characters.
There is a kind of
collective brain that starts to show up when you get ten people on a room.
You become presented with payoffs of things that you would set up earlier on
that fills though they were plan from day one.
Now, that been said, I knew where certain parts of the story were going
and many parts of the story were going along the way.
And I had big temples that I knew where we're we wanted to hit.
I had connections that I had seen from day one:
Nathan would be Claire's father.
Our daughter just found me.
We need to talk, Nathan.
One of the problems with knowing where you gonna go,
or being too sure about where you gonna go,
is that there is a very good chance that you will arrive there too quickly.
So what you thought would be a fabulous, revealing episode eighteen,
you have now arrived at in episode six,
with no plan for what to do between six and eighteen.
So it's best not to lock yourself into things,
to allow the story to unfold and to start to speak to you.
When you have actors of the caliber that we're working with,
you find that the actors themselves
meet the writers halfway on telling stories.
I can't imagine that my character was ever drawn out
the way that it is evolved to begin with.
I mean I was, you know, three scenes for five or six lines in the pilot,
as this sort of spooky, maybe CIA operative.
- Where to, my friend? - JFK, please.
And then near the end is revealed to be Claire's father.
Hey, daddy.
Hi, baby.
Part of the early conversation with Jack was
that we asked him to play the evil, nefarious, immoral character
with exactly the same passion and commitment
that he plays the love and protection and total commitment to his daughter.
I'm not done protecting you from the world.
- I love you, dad. - I love you too, sweetheart.
It is the power of Jack Coleman, and of Hayden,
to have created such a strong and intense relationship with one another.
It's fun to see what the actors do with it, you know
they sometimes add lines, take away lines
add their character to, and just makes it a whole new thing.
Everybody is chipping in, because they have
there's so passion about the show, they're so excited:
"Oh, I bet I can, you know, I can help making this better
by adding this, and this, and this."
- Hiro Nakamura, I presume. - Mister Isaac?
The actual scene with the Star Trek thing,
I thought it would be fun to throw like a Vulcan Salute,
and luckily the writers liked it too, so they kept that in there.
People ask me all the time, do we pick the power and then build the character?
There would be no way to do that,
and we have to always start from the character.
That was the strength of the show,
I felt was that people were going to be able to relate to this people.
Peter Parker is infinitely more interesting than Spider-Man.
Spider-Man is just a guy when he run on his pajama unless you know Peter's story.
The Heroes, you know, was based on this comic archetypes, you know,
you have, you know, the single mother, you know, the office drone,
the really empathetic guy, and you have all this interesting
comic book archetypes that you find in comic books.
The writers room is populated by a lot of a lot of comic book,
gee-gee guys that love comic books and grew up with comic books,
and a huge part of our fan base are people who grew up reading comic books
and know the stuff really well.
And while the show is trying to present a very ordinary world,
there is still this tremendous desire that we have to reach out to those viewers.
The things that comics are known for, which is:
"Oh, there is this spectacular fight!" or
the "Oh, you know, whack down a building!"
those aren't the things that people who love the medium talk about,
they talk about the intimate moments,
they talk about when a character dies, they talk about
when a character changes direction.
The character of Hiro really allows us to do that in a kind of organic way,
he's a guy who not only grew up with Japanese manga comic books,
but was clearly influenced by, you know, the classic superhero comics.
I'm Hiro.
Heroes may have captivated the comic book crowd,
but what is it about the show that is one of a millions more around the world?
Every character is going through something that the audience can relate to.
One of the charms of the show is this:
"Ok, so maybe you don't particularly like
those two funny, Japanese guys, that they're off having this adventures...
what you might like is this cheerleader
who's going through trouble at high school,
and if you don't like that, well, there's this single mom,
who's having problems making ends meet.
It's stepped into something
that I think we're all feeling in the world right now,
which is a bit of uneasiness, you know,
there isn't much you can count on, in the way of politics,
in the way of the weather, in the way of mother nature
and just society in general, there's really unrest going on,
and it's nice to know that there are maybe people out there,
that you can count on. Heroes.
They've grown up all over the world, and I've always seen the world as
as not small in what in days sometimes it looks.
It seems huge but, you know, there's
really much more linked in what we think, and I think that's what the script does.
It captures all these different worlds,
it captures all these different, you know, human aspects.
And then they combine with all these supernatural problems,
but it makes it all kind of, you know, links it all together.
The script is so well thought out, and has so many possibilities.
You know, as, I'll quote Tim Kring saying that:
"You know, executives want answers. Audiences want questions."
And there's a lot of questions in the script.
The writers on Heroes have really tried to answer the questions.
And raise new questions,
and exciting ones at the same time but really satisfy the audience.
Giving them those huge reveals, and huge answers right away.
Two episodes later, even in the same episode.
But there are still some questions that are waiting answers,
like who does Mr. Bennet work for,
what happened to Niki's sister, how did she died?
Who's Linderman?
And what about the Haitian, has he turned against Mr. Bennet?
All these unsolved mysteries
leave plenty of material for the scriptwriters to play with.
Because we have so many characters,
you have to be able to tell the story in very, sort of quick brush strokes.
Very straightforward storytelling,
the story is very complicated, but the actual scenes
have a very straightforward line, people say what's on their mind.
People state the text, and not the subtext.
I want my money back.
The complex nature of the storylines
means that several tales of tolding each episode.
With our Heroes in different locations all over the world.
Kring knew that it was gonna be challenging for the audience
to keep jumping around from story to story.
So how could we help the audience?
So that when they shifted from Claire in Texas
to Isaac at the loft, to New York.
Do they would know we had actually left cities,
and it wasn't all just one big mess somewhere.
One of the tools we got is just color, and New York City,
where a lot of the story takes place tends to be cooler,
and we used blues, blue light.
When you go to Texas there's an amber tint,
when you go to Los Vegas it's blown out and there's like,
sometimes you look in some of the shots and you actually see the grain in the film.
And we gave Los Angeles a very kind of crisp and colorful look.
Tokyo was a kind of greenish, more fluorescent bluish kind of feel to it.
What it does is it subconsciously helps you as you're watching the show,
go: "Oh, we've shifted, we've moved, there's a different color palette."
I'm gonna get on a flight, tell Hiro that I'll be there before he knows it.
Yes, okay. I will tell him.
Good-bye, Peter Petrelli.
That concept is something that's regularly used
in comic books and graphic novels, to do the exact thing,
which is to help the reader to understand where now it gonna shift.
And you may have spotted another slightly more obvious device
to help the audience know where they are.
In the first act, when you first meet anyone of your characters,
you see: "Mohinder Suresh, Brooklyn, New York".
It's written right there for you, so you can start to get to know,
not only who they are, but where they live.
As the stories unfold, and new Heroes are revealed,
we can look forward to meeting more extraordinary characters in the future.
One of the things that we wanted to say is that
we are watching one small slice of drama,
but that we are alluding to the fact that
there are many other dramas happening out there,
that we aren't seeing.
These people...
are all out there waiting to be told that they are important.
Waiting to unlock their true potential.
I know it.
I can feel them.
It will allow us to drop into one of those people's lives
at some point along the way, and tell their story.
You've kinda got a license to go anywhere,
you know, you got people that come back.
The fact that Hiro's character jumps around in time means that,
you know, even someone dying doesn't mean he's dead because you can go back,
so you kind of trust that there's so many places you can go to,
even tough now it's being like: "Wow, I mean, what else can we do now?"
For the writers, the possibilities are endless.
But when they come up with scenes like these,
it's time to the special effects teams to take it from script to screen.
I look at creating visual effects as
as a way of thinking about it from a character's prospective.
And try to bring out their ability in a way that
had a genuine genesis if you will, that there was a logic to it.
You end up hopefully creating something
that feels part and partial to the actual character,
and it doesn't stand out, it's not like: "Character did something? Ops,
visual effect happens. And then back to the character."
You know, you don't wanna do that, because it's jarring,
it's like the best things that I've created are the things that don't stand out.
If you go to the fan sites, for the most part
they don't even mention anything about the visual effects.
Which is the greatest of compliment, because they are not distracted by them,
they're always focused on the character, and a story and
what's going to happen next.
And it's not only the viewers that can't wait to find out future storylines.
We are obviously ahead of what's being played on TV,
but at the same time
we go through the same rollercoaster ride that the audience does.
We are just as excited, just as thrilled.
We never know where it's gonna go,
I don't know how much the writers have mapped out,
I know that a lot of it's in Tim's head, I know they've come to
they've come to us when they get really excited about things and they say:
"Oh, you're not gonna believe what's coming up next week,
you're not gonna believe, it's gonna be great, you know!"
But they won't tell you what that is.
We're dying to know what happens in each script, and
we know that there are certain writers on the writing staff
that are more loose-lipped than other ones, and
we're trying to press them for information.
How we're gonna be able to save the world,
you know, how we're gonna stop the explosion in New York.
There is something nice about not knowing what you gonna do later,
so you're really in the present.
You don't do something because you know what's you gonna be doing
in the next two or three episodes.
We usually get out scripts about
tops three days before we shoot the episode, it's a very secretive thing.
We have to turn in all of our scripts after we've shoot them to be shredded,
it's just secrecy so the story doesn't get out.
So we literally have no idea of what's gonna happen.
I mean, you've the biggest fear for every actor on the show,
is you open the script and you're like: "I'm dead."
Any of us can go, at any time.
So, you know, it's it's throwing and at the same time it can be depressing,
as an actor, to know, you know, you're waiting for the next script,
and when you read it and at the end you're still alive, you're like:
"Oh! Thank you, Tim Kring."
- Me again. - What?
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